The Heart of Lies, A Paradise Valley Mystery: Book Two

by Debra Burroughs

  “You’re lying,” Josh seethed.

  “There’s nothing between us.” Lucas fought to get the words out, struggling to breathe. “I love Maggie.”

  “You think I’m stupid?” Josh’s eyes widened as the stress in his voice rose. “I saw her wiping lipstick off your freakin’ lip.”

  “That wasn’t lipstick—it was barbecue sauce,” Lucas squeaked under the forceful weight of Josh’s muscular arm.

  “I’m not buying it! You two are way too friendly to be all business. I swear, you break it off with my mother or I’m going to tell her what I saw tonight.” Josh stepped back, releasing his pressure against Lucas’s neck.

  Lucas grabbed at his throat and coughed a few times. “I promise, Josh, it’s not what you think,” he sputtered. He bent over, putting his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. “I would never hurt your mom. I love her.” He drew in a few more breaths. “Let’s get through this party and then I’ll let her down gently tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Just give me some time to do it in my own way.”

  “I’ll probably regret it, but I will give you until tomorrow at six or I’ll tell her myself.”

  ~*~

  Emily passed by the den as Josh stormed out. She noticed Lucas in the room, doubled over and breathing hard. “What on earth?”

  “Not now, Emily,” Josh growled as he stomped away.

  “Lucas?” she asked from the doorway. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing to worry about.” Lucas pulled himself upright. “Just a difference of opinion.” He squeezed past her, smoothing his hair with his hand, and he returned to the party.

  Emily immediately went looking for Isabel to fill her in on what she’d seen and she hoped they could put a plan together to find out what was really going on. The Semanski trial be damned—they had put off the background check long enough.

  After watching Lucas’s interaction with Sully on the lawn, and now this conflict with Josh, Emily was convinced something was up. She had to find a way to get Sully and Josh to talk to her. If Maggie was set to marry this guy in two weeks, then time was running out to find out what was going on and save her friend from perhaps the biggest mistake of her life.

  CHAPTER 10

  Sully had left his sister’s engagement party without even saying good-bye to her. He felt terrible about it. The rude departure was so unlike him, but there was no way he could appear happy in front of her when her husband-to-be was ruining his life—and hers too. And the worst part of it was that he couldn’t even warn his sister what was happening without bringing his own crime out into the open.

  His wife, Carolyn, would be surprised that he’d returned so early from the party. Sully had tried to encourage her to come for a little while, but nothing he said changed her mind. The pain was becoming unbearable for her and she was embarrassed by the slurred speech and jerky actions her MS brought on.

  Carolyn had been a vivacious and active woman before she became ill. Now, even though Sully’s love for her was unwavering, she became a constant source of financial and emotional stress for him. The difficult conversations, the mounting hospital bills that were not covered by their insurance and his loneliness for a companion at the many functions he had to attend. His love for her remained solid, but his character was cracking under the constant pressure, causing him to make a bad decision that could ruin everything.

  He had picked her up out of her wheelchair and placed her in her recliner before he’d left for the party, sticking her favorite romantic movie in the DVD player—An Affair to Remember—to keep her company while he was gone. When he’d returned home, he noticed she had fallen asleep with the movie still playing.

  He went to turn the television off when he saw the scene in the movie, near the end, when Cary Grant learns his love, Deborah Kerr, is paralyzed, sitting on the sofa with a blanket over her motionless legs. She didn’t want to tell him she was paralyzed, to burden him, because she loved him so much. When Cary Grant realizes she is an invalid, he rushes to her, throws his arms around her and kisses her passionately because he doesn’t care—he loves her.

  Watching that scene, it dawned on Sully for the first time that this was why Carolyn loved this movie.

  He turned the TV and DVD player off and turned back to his wife. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for her. Thinking about the hundred thousand dollars and the possibility of jail, he paced the floor, mumbling under his breath.

  “Sully?” Carolyn’s soft voice called his name.

  Sully rushed to her side. “I’m here, Carolyn. What do you need?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “You look so worried. You’re wearing a path in the carpet and talking to yourself. What’s wrong?” Poor Carolyn struggled to get the words out.

  “Nothing I can’t handle, sweetheart. Don’t worry yourself.” He looked into her tired eyes and smiled tenderly. The last thing he wanted was to worry his wife—that would be too cruel. She had enough to handle with her illness—she didn’t need his problems as well. “Worries are part of the job when you’re the mayor.”

  He hoped that would satisfy her, but if he didn’t get the hundred thousand dollars back into the city’s retirement fund soon, he would not be able to hide the truth from her much longer. What would happen to her if he was in jail? Who would take care of her? Who would pay for her medical bills? He had to find a way to get the money back in the account.

  “It’s late, sweetheart. Why don’t I take you to bed now?”

  ~*~

  The next morning Josh stopped by his uncle’s house to discuss what he had seen and overheard at the engagement party. He told him how he had struggled with it all night, avoiding his mother for fear he would blurt out what he’d witnessed. And because he had promised to give Lucas twenty-four hours to tell her what happened, he felt duty-bound to hold to it.

  “I should’ve just confronted him in front of my mom last night at the party, not given him time to come clean. What was I thinking? If I had dealt with it at the party, my gut wouldn’t be twisting like someone’s big fist had a hold of my insides.” Josh sat on the edge of the sofa, his shoulders slumped, and his head hung down. He looked up at his uncle. “But I didn’t want to embarrass her, ya know?”

  “Maybe you misunderstood, Josh. Is that possible?” Sully asked, taking a seat next to him.

  “No, Uncle Sully, I know what I saw and what I heard.” Josh was adamant. He shot up from the sofa and turned to face his uncle. “He was definitely fooling around with that girl—his assistant,” he said through clenched teeth. His jaw twitched with anger as he began to pace back and forth.

  “I want you to calm down, son,” Sully tried to reason.

  “I just want to kill him!” Josh slammed his clenched fist into the open palm of his other hand.

  “Hey, don’t ever say that,” Sully warned.

  “I promise you, Uncle Sully, if that man hurts my momma—”

  He felt like a caged beast, holding back his rage. “I’ll tear him apart with my bare hands!” Josh threatened, displaying his fists as the lethal weapons they were. He was so enraged, his body was trembling.

  Sully rose from his seat and put a hand on Josh’s shoulder. “Boy, you need to calm down before you do something you’ll regret. That quick temper of yours is going to get you into trouble someday.”

  “You’re saying I can fight to defend my country, but I can’t fight to defend my mother?”

  “It’s not the same. Think about it. What’ll hurt your mom worse? A man breaking her heart or her son ending up in prison for the rest of his life?”

  Josh jerked back like someone had slapped him hard. Visions of being hauled to prison in chains and an orange jumpsuit flashed before his eyes.

  “Now, son, as her big brother, my first instinct is to protect your mother, too—always has been—but when I jump in without thinking things through, I usually make
matters a whole lot worse. Let’s give Lucas the day to tell her, like you said. Then, I’ll go see him at the end of the day and have a man-to-man talk with him.”

  Though Josh wanted nothing more than to rip Lucas’s head off with his bare hands and feed it to the wolves, he considered that his uncle might be right. The last thing he wanted was to hurt his mother. He took a breath, sucked in hard, and released a cry of exasperation.

  He would wait, he told his uncle, but if Lucas hadn’t broken it off with his mother by tonight, he was going to take matters into his own hands and it wouldn’t be pretty. Sully had until six o’clock to deal with the scoundrel, Josh said.

  ~*~

  Sully spent the day agonizing over how he was going to protect his little sister and still get the city’s money back from Lucas Wakefield. He knew that if he pushed Lucas to break off the engagement with Maggie, rumors would spread all over the valley and people would start pulling their money out of the Whitetail Resort. He and Lucas needed the prospects on the bus trip next week to invest their money or Lucas would not be returning the hundred thousand dollars to Sully.

  Was Josh right about Lucas fooling around with his assistant? Was she involved in the scam? Or was she just working for Lucas and fooling around with him, unaware of what was really going on?

  Sully remembered Maggie introducing Fiona to him at the welcome party for Lucas, telling him she had been in the area for a while and she hadn’t had much luck finding a job. He recalled Maggie introducing Fiona to Lucas, as well. So, she couldn’t have initially been part of the plan—but was she now? Had she been sucked in by this powerful and charming man, just as Maggie had?

  It was going to be a long day, Sully told himself, waiting to see if Lucas would do the right thing and tell Maggie. If the town thought Lucas was stepping out on Maggie, he had to know it would ruin him. So why was he willing to fool around with his assistant with so much at stake? Knowing firsthand of Lucas’s devious and manipulative ways, he would likely be planning his own damage control strategy to keep Maggie under his spell, keeping her from believing that Josh was right in what he saw and heard, maybe even devising some way to get Josh out of the picture altogether.

  Sully shuddered. Did he really even have any idea what Lucas was capable of?

  ~*~

  Emily sat at her desk, in front of the computer in her office across the main hall from Lucas’s office. She had been searching the internet all morning, trying to find something on Lucas Wakefield. She had attempted to call Isabel several times in the last few hours, but it always went to voicemail. Though it was frustrating, Emily knew that if Isabel was working hard on a case at the FBI, sometimes she could not be reached for non-FBI purposes.

  Isabel had worked for months doing the financial analyses on the George Semanski murder and kidnapping case and it would be going to court soon. She’d had to go out of town a few weeks ago and lately had been putting in some fourteen to sixteen hour days. She had managed to get the evening off last night for Maggie and Lucas’s engagement party, but Emily assumed she was back at her office working again.

  All the intense work on the Semanski case, leading up to the trial, meant Isabel hadn’t had the spare time to look into Lucas’s background yet. Emily didn’t have the federal contacts Isabel did, so she had to rely on her own investigative methods.

  If Detective Colin Andrews had still been in town, she could have asked him for a few favors and he would have gladly complied. But his replacement, Detective Ernie Kaufman—good ol’ Ernie—wasn’t as cooperative. He was old school, by the book, and Emily wasn’t romantically involved with him.

  Boy, I miss Colin.

  Emily had found several different Lucas Wakefield’s on the internet, none of which seemed to match the description of her subject—a high school football player in the south, an insurance adjuster in the Midwest, a pharmacy owner in Texas, and a professor in England.

  Something wasn’t adding up. Maybe if she could get something with Lucas’s fingerprints on it, she would have more success. She was hoping she could convince Isabel to squeeze the request for that analysis into the middle of her hectic schedule. DNA would be better, but that could take weeks to get the results. By then it would be too late.

  Lucas and Maggie would be married.

  Her cell phone began to ring and she dug it out of her pocket. “Hello.”

  “Hey, Em, this is Isabel. I see you tried me quite a few times this morning. What’s up?”

  “I wondered if you’d had a chance to do that background check on Lucas yet.”

  “Not yet. I’ve been buried with this case. But as soon as I get a breather, I’m on it.”

  “After what I saw at the party last night, I think we need to move quickly.” Emily had discussed her observations briefly with Isabel after the party was over, but they hadn’t had the chance to discuss it in depth and formulate a plan. “What if I can get you something with Lucas’s fingerprints on it? Can you ask for a test to be run?”

  “When would you have it?” Isabel asked.

  “Tonight. I’m having dinner with Maggie to go over some of the wedding plans, so I’ll have it after that, and I’ll drop it at your house later.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll take it in tomorrow.”

  “But tomorrow is Sunday.”

  “Ugh, don’t remind me—I have to work—trying to tie up loose ends before trial. Tomorrow being Sunday, though, there won’t be anyone to run the prints ’til Monday. But if I get it submitted, we can be first in line and I can push it on Monday.”

  “Thanks, Isabel. I’ll let you get back to work.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Emily showed up at Maggie’s little house around five, anxious to find something she could be sure had Lucas’s fingerprints on it. Maggie lived in a cottage-style house just a few blocks from Emily in the charming, older section of Paradise Valley. It was pretty as a postcard with painted white clapboard and black shutters, set off by a deep red arched-top front door.

  The front yard was profuse with flowers and blooming rosebushes, bordered with a white picket fence. It was the kind of home Maggie grew up dreaming of back in her dirt-floor shack in Texas.

  “Come in, Em,” Maggie squealed, giving her friend a warm hug. “I can’t wait to show you the invitations I’ve picked out. I want you to tell me which one you think is prettiest.”

  “Okay.”

  Maggie took Emily’s hand and dragged her to the cozy dining room. The table was covered with magazines and catalogs lying open with pads of colorful sticky notes strewn amongst them. Maggie excitedly pointed out which one was which, and how she had put bright yellow sticky notes on the items she liked.

  “I don’t think we can do all of this within the next two weeks, Maggs,” Emily said.

  “I know, but it’s a nice idea, isn’t it? My first weddin’ was in front of a Justice of the Peace in Hollywood, so I was hopin’ this one would be magical and romantic, with a big white weddin’ dress—the whole shebang.” Maggie’s big blue eyes moistened and her lips thinned as she appeared to be fighting off the disappointment.

  “We’ll see what we can do,” Emily assured her, patting her hand. “Let’s make some plans. Guest list first so we can get the invitations out right away, then we’ll set a time to go shopping this week for everything else.”

  “I knew I could count on you, Em.” Maggie’s expression brightened.

  Emily took on a serious tone. “You know you can always count on me, Maggie, but I have to ask you…” She paused, trying to find the best way to say what was in her heart.

  “What is it?” Maggie’s countenance grew serious as well.

  “Are you certain you’re making the right decision? Marrying Lucas before you have a chance to truly get to know him?”

  “What are you sayin’? You don’t like him?”

  “I’m saying Isabel and I—”

  “Y’all have been discussin’ me and Lucas?” Maggie spoke as if she felt betrayed.

>   “Listen to me, Maggie. Isabel and I are just concerned. We want nothing more than happiness for you, but we want to make sure you’re doing the right thing.” Emily could see she had upset Maggie, but this was too important to just drop it. “How much do you really know about him? About his background? Who he was before you met him?”

  “We’ve talked for hours and hours over the past few months. He’s never given me any reason to doubt what he’s told me—or that he loves me.”

  “He may not be who you think he is.”

  “Like Evan?” Maggie asked pointedly. “Just because you’re findin’ out Evan wasn’t who he said he was doesn’t mean every man is like that.”

  “It has nothing to do with Evan,” Emily snapped back, hoping she was right. Camille had also accused her of projecting her suspicions of Evan onto Lucas, and she had vehemently denied it. Could they be right?

  “Are you sure?” Maggie questioned.

  “Did you know Lucas had an argument with Sully at the party last night?” Emily asked, arching an eyebrow, trying to direct the discussion away from Evan.

  “No. I did notice Sully left without sayin’ good-bye, but Lucas told me there was some city emergency he had to deal with.”

  “Did you know he had a fight with your son, too?”

  “With Josh? If that’s true, why didn’t Josh say anythin’ to me about it?

  “Where is Josh? Let’s ask him,” Emily posed.

  “Uh, I don’t know. We didn’t really talk last night and he’s been gone all day. I assume he’s out with his buddies, doin’ something with them while he’s home.

  “Why don’t I give him a call?” Emily pulled her phone out of her purse.

  “You don’t need to do that,” Maggie protested.

  Emily raised a hand to shush Maggie.

  “Josh, this is Emily. I’m at your mom’s and we were wondering if you’d be home for supper?” Emily met Maggie’s gaze as she talked.